World Family Tree

Family Trees of the World

If you accept that the history of people began with two individuals, and Sorenson Molecular Genealogy experts have concluded that this is the case with their DNA testing, then it follows that we are all related in one degree or another. While not every family in the world has traced their family tree, enough people have to show many comingling lines during the medieval time period. In fact, if you are submitting names for proxy LDS temple ordinances and they lived prior to the 1500s, then you need to send the names to a department of the Church for verification. The population of Europe and Britain was small enough (at least that were recorded) that the Church knows who they were and temple ordinances have already been performed in their behalf. The key lies in the fact that a written record had to have been kept.

There are a number of web sites through which you can access family trees from around the world. One of these is OneGreatFamily.com and another is genealogy.com. Both are subscription sites. FamilySearch.org provides similar information for free but they have made little effort in the past to presume connections among people unless the person submitting the information had already done so. One of the efforts of the Church to gather world family tree information (both members and non-members of the church) was to accept "four-generation" pedigree charts and accompanying family group sheets. The Church requested this several times with the result that there is much duplication, inaccuracy and incompletion. However, all these family trees from around the world were collected, microfilmed and made available to the public. It is up to the viewer to decide which family belongs to another and which belongs to them.

There are a number of ways you can obtain family trees from around the world. The easiest is by searching the web. Simply type the surname into a search engine like Google and a lot of responses will appear. You can narrow your search by adding given names, dates and places. These sites have been submitted by individuals from around the world. Some are good; some are not. To determine if a family tree is any good, look for detail in dates and places. Sample a few families to see if parents were indeed born before their children, that they did not die before their children were born, or that an eighty year old woman did not give birth. Look at birth places. Do they make sense? Does it look like one child was born in America and the next in England and the next in Germany and the next in China? Good world family trees will also document where the information was found.

At some point, a lot of world family trees that go back several centuries tie into royal lines. If you are familiar with history at all, you will realize that a fair number of royal male heirs had illegitimate children, and they had children etc. However, once you are within the legitimate royal line, please exercise great caution. Very many so-called royal lines are pure fabrication resulting from the genealogist of the time period creating a line that would confirm the monarch's right to rule ("divine right of kings") and wanting to keep his head on his shoulders.

Even within recent generations of our own families, we often find that our ancestors immigrated to America or Canada from other parts of the world, thus contributing to our own world family tree. I have recently been working on a family tree that goes back to England and Wales within 5 generations. In my own family, lines go back to Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany and Switzerland within 4 generations. Some of you may be much closer in time to immigration from around the world.